Router drawings

Medium: Acrylic and beeswax painted hoop pine ply panels carved with a router.

Joanne’s Router Drawings were initially inspired by the results of insects boring into and under the bark of trees. The artworks are made to emulate such organic activity by agency of a mechanical “human” process.

Joanne has produced a number of Router Drawing series, forming an evolving engagement with this material and process.

In the Fire Series (2006) engraved loose freeform lines are suggestive of plant form and organic wanderings of a mechanical tool.

The Unbound  (2007) series incorporated highly formal line work gleaned from western classical period design carved into the panels. Overlapped and repeated in apparent random formations, the lines are drawn back into organic configurations from which they were derived.

The prescribed classical framework was used again with a different approach in the Consumed (2009) works. The formal line work informed the process as a subtle underlying pattern over which the coloured surface is richly worked with router carvings: spots, scribbles and snaking lines sprawl over and into the panels using varying depths and profiles.

The latest series, titled Another Turn, (2011) draws on the classical symmetry of woodturning to inform the increasingly detailed abstract carvings.